Tag: ‘exercise’
January 12, 2010 at 8:53 am
PastaQueen reads a book. And finishes it! And tells you about it!
Like this postOctober 14, 2009 at 9:08 am
When I am running, I try not to think about the fact that I’m running. That is because running sucks. Anyone who tells you running doesn’t suck is a liar. Have you ever seen the runners at the end of the Boston Marathon? They are thrilled to cross the finish line because it means they don’t have to run any farther. Even the fast people are exhausted at the end of the race.
I love running too, even though it sucks. I love the happy chemicals it releases in my body. I get a great feeling of accomplishment after I survive a race. Sometimes, I even feel like a graceful, yet powerful gazelle, jaunting across the Sahara, even though I probably look more like a chubby housecat sprinting for a bag of Friskies. Still, running is uncomfortable. It makes me breathe hard and leaves me very sweaty and sticky and stinky.
This is why I try to ignore the fact that I am running while I am running. I didn’t quite realize that I was doing, until [...]
October 12, 2009 at 9:16 am
Chutes and Ladders was one of the board games I played when my age was a single-digit number, along with Sorry! and Candyland. While Candyland was a sugary, sweet fantasy world with candy cane forests and gumdrop mountains, Chutes and Ladders was more like reality because just when you thought you were ahead, life would knock you on your ass and you’d fall behind. For those unfamiliar with the rules, you’d roll the dice and then move your figure that many spaces forward. If the space you landed on had a ladder, you got to move up to the space the ladder pointed to. If you landed on a chute, you fell down to a previous space.
Last year, I felt like I’d landed on square 87 and slid down the long, long chute to square 24, and not just because those squares show the doofus who’s trying to sneak cookies from the cookie jar. Life was going pretty well. I was exercising and eating right and I’d gotten a shiny, new job and all was [...]
October 10, 2009 at 10:11 am
I finally got my hands on a copy of the November edition of Runner’s World, so now I can scan page 80 and tell you all how and grateful and honored I am to be in it (though I’d be just a teensy bit more grateful if they’d mentioned my book or my blog). I was interviewed for the “How it Feels…” article back in July to tell people what it feels like to run off half your weight. I am pretty much over myself, so I don’t usually mention these things, but I’m really flattered to be included in the same article as people who have run in outer space, broken world records, and run dressed as a Porta Potty. (There’s an idea for my Run Like Hell costume.) Does this mean I’m real runner? I must be! I was in Runner’s World! (The full article can be seen after the jump, at the bottom of this post, by clicking “Continue reading” below.)
When the copy editors were fact checking the article, they sent me [...]
October 8, 2009 at 9:03 am
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. It seems pretty easy. I don’t mean to brag, but I have been breathing all my life. However, one of my doctors at the headache clinic I visit has been teaching me how to breathe even better. If you breathe deeply from the diaphragm you oxygenate your blood more quickly and you can reduce tension. It feels pretty silly to be sitting in a doctor’s office breathing in and out like I’m in a Lamaze class, but I do what they tell me and hand them my money.
I was on the treadmill yesterday, running as part of my training for my next race, and I started to concentrate on my breathing. Usually I breathe in for 3 steps and breathe out for 2 at the beginning. Then as I get more tired, I breathe in for 2 steps and breathe out for 1. As I was breathing, I thought about the headache clinic and all the deep breathing I’ve been doing. So I started to breathe deeper, [...]
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